


a tooth for a tooth

by erzi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: M/M, exes who still wanna fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 12:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18965686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: A shift in the air, the presence of another, and he whirls around, parasol at the ready, an incantation at the tip of his tongue."Shuuichi," he ends up saying, but that is a hex of its own.He's looking out at the lake, left profile all that is visible to Seiji. The sunlight glows white on his glasses, tiny square rainbows cast over his eye. His arms are stiffly at his sides – unnatural on anyone, but this is Shuuichi, and he is Seiji, and he cannot name the frayed tenuousness between them, but he can recognize its symptoms.





	a tooth for a tooth

The youkai keeps to a cycle, a cycle like the turning of the moon, predictable when the eyes care to be open and see. Seiji has only one eye to watch the world with, and though he has taught himself to live with limited depth perception and to ignore the whisper of cloth forever over half of his face, it's sometimes maddening to have full use of his vision and shun it because of the deceit of an ancestor past.

He keeps this secret, of course. He has a reputation to uphold. Matoba Seiji, the perpetually facetiously smiling head of the Matoba clan, powerful enough to keep dissenters' voices to a mumble. The youkai haunting his family is a nuisance handled with an air of snide annoyance. How troublesome it is to expect the expected and spirit it away.

The youkai has its tricks, but so too does the clan. They learn from one another, locked in an eternal struggle, neither willing to yield: a broken promise enacted in revenge for the youkai, a betrayal countered with strength for the clan. It has made Seiji wary; it has sharpened his edges and tongue and most of all the dark glint to his eye.

It is around the time the youkai will seek him. His right eye is covered, his decoy of a parasol twirls in his hands. He is using it as it is meant to, keeping the harsh rays of summer away walking along a lake shore. The lake catches the sunlight in a little million diamonds flitting at its surface. He shouldn't be here without company, parasol marking him for the target he is, but the weather has finally cleared, and this decaying estate of a long-gone clan once submissive to his family has a view to be admired. The glittering lake is ringed by forest dark with ancient trees huddled close, roots and branches twisted upon each other as they each fight for soil and light and water.

 _There could be youkai worth binding there_ , Seiji thinks, expression unchanging. No flare of hope comes with that thought – there is so little to be had it's best to not hope at all.

Pebbles dimple the soles of his shoes. He picks one up, turning it over in his palm. Smooth and slick. He flicks his eye to the water. How long has it beat upon the shore to round the rock this thoroughly? In double that time, would the pebbles be so worn as to be sand carried away by a breeze?

A shift in the air, the presence of another, and he whirls around, parasol at the ready, an incantation at the tip of his tongue.

"Shuuichi," he ends up saying, but that is a hex of its own.

He's looking out at the lake, left profile all that is visible to Seiji. The sunlight glows white on his glasses, tiny square rainbows cast over his eye. His arms are stiffly at his sides – unnatural on anyone, but this is Shuuichi, and he is Seiji, and he cannot name the frayed tenuousness between them, but he can recognize its symptoms.

"It's nice out," Shuuichi says.

Seiji moves the parasol imperceptibly to point at Shuuichi's heart. "How did you get here?" This is a private estate, and while the land it overlooks is free for anyone to roam, his timing is too... _too_...

"I was in the area. I was walking and saw you. I wanted to ask you something."

Ice had longed claimed Seiji's heart, perfect and cold. A tiny, thin crack appears somewhere in it. "What?"

" _Give me your right eye!_ " Shuuichi roars in a voice of a dozen creatures, skin melting as he throws himself at Seiji, sinuous black hands reaching for his face.

Seiji swings the parasol at the youkai's head, the force slamming the youkai down, pebbles scattering under its weight. In that time Seiji had gained his footing, produced a roll of inked parchment, and uttered the words needed for the paper, thrown at the youkai's forehead, to make it vanish in an agonized black puff.

The crack has already mended, hardening.

Nanase won't be pleased with him having been alone when fighting off the youkai. Likely people will be dismissed for it. It doesn't matter to Seiji at all, though. He's brought a hand to his covered eye without realizing it. There is a dry acridness in his mouth.

 _Why_ , he thinks, _did it take Shuuichi's form?_

Did it mean Shuuichi _was_ in the area? But how would the youkai know Seiji knew Shuuichi? Could it have learned to see into his head and pick apart his thoughts?

He puts pressure on his right eye, making himself focus on that discomfort and not whatever age-yellowed memories he has of Shuuichi.

Later he asks Nanase, omitting whose form the youkai took. It had simply been someone he knew; why could it be?

"To get close to you," she answers, impassive. "It's been known to take the shape of someone a Matoba knows or is fond of in hopes to get close enough to steal the eye."

He nods curtly in thanks, betraying no indication of the insect-like buzzing clouding his lungs. 

* * *

Seiji, close-eyed, cradles a cup of tea, its grassy scent steaming around his nose, its flavor trickling down his throat. He keeps his eyes closed as he sets the cup down soundlessly, making sense of his surroundings blind. The whisper of leaves in the night breeze. The tatami pressing onto his feet curled under him. The ringing emptiness of the inn's room brimming with the promise of something to come.

He opens his eyes, the different things his free and covered ones see momentarily confusing. Years like this and with every blink, with every morning's awakening, his vision still insists what he sees is wrong.

Carefully, he surveys the room. Nothing out of the ordinary save the protections he'd brought himself. Charms ward the vengeful youkai away; at the center of the room upon scattered paper he's drawn a banishing circle. All he must do is wait for a shadow on the wall.

To Nanase's chagrin, he'd insisted he'd be fine by himself. The youkai might not even come today, kept away by the other with rumored formidable power haunting this inn. That was his reason for boarding alone: should he see the inn's youkai, he will make it his. No help needed.

He drinks his tea, palate scalded.

Movement, there is movement on the wall; something upright, long-limbed, reaches for the sliding door and so Seiji grabs a piece of parchment without glancing at it, knowing its position in the room as sure as he knows what he'll do next.

The door opens and in a few nimble strides Seiji meets the youkai, human in shape, sweeping it by a kick to the ankles; it yelps, its voice human – it has perfected its imitation. Seiji drags it inside the room by its shirt's lapel, throwing it at the center of the circle, keeping its struggling self down by chokehold and in the room's dim light he sees the youkai's chosen to take Shuuichi's form again.

His fingers tighten ever slightly around its neck.

The youkai has kept scratching at him, and he's evaded it; it's kept trying to hoarsely call out, but Seiji's recited incantation suffocates even that. The paper below them is starting to glow white-blue when the youkai punches him, _hard_ , teeth splitting his lower lip, while kneeing him sharply in the abdomen. Seiji, bloodied and wheezing, falls on his back; pain shoots up along his spine to match that at his mouth and chest. The youkai straddles him, swinging its arm back, fist stopping in front of Seiji's face.

"It's _you_ ," the youkai croaks, light gliding off its glasses, revealing narrowed eyes.

Two eyes.

Seiji coughs as he regains his breathing. He pushes himself onto his elbow, leaning up to meet the real Natori Shuuichi. "It's me."

For one heartbeat they stay close like that, somewhere uncomfortable between disgust and desire, before Shuuichi briskly gets off him, sitting with his back to the wall furthest from Seiji. Seiji is rooted to his spot, body pulsing where Shuuichi has left it cold. His lip turns down.

"Care to explain what that was about?" Shuuichi says. Bitterness seeps through his usual carefree tone. "Or why you're in my room?"

Seiji looks at him. Shuuichi is staring pointedly at the ceiling, rubbing his neck. Seiji thinks he can see plum hand-shaped bruises blooming around it.

"This is my room," he says, smile not so much as crinkling his face.

Shuuichi turns to him, frowning. "What?"

"Not only did I not know you were here, but if I did, would I have had enough time to set all this up?" He gestures to the exorcism preparations.

The tension in Shuuichi's shoulders does not go away. "Fine, but why did you attack me and try to exorcise me? Did you think I was a youkai?"

 _Yes. More than one of you haunts me_. Fortune has it Seiji's had time to learn the art of half-truths. "Yes. My clan and I are here to bind the inn's youkai to our service, but we don't know its form. Only that it's shadowed. Your outline was ambiguous and dark enough to cause my mistake."

Shuuichi doesn't seem convinced. He doesn't word his disbelief; it's in his face, easier to read than Shuuichi realizes. His acting, praised as it is elsewhere, tends to crumble in front of Seiji.

But so too does Seiji need to remember who he is when Shuuichi stumbles back into his life.

His smile is sweet as poison. It might be leaking out with the blood on his lip. "But wasn't it like reliving old times? We're used to those positions."

His heart echoes in his ears in the laboriously slow time it takes for Shuuichi to briefly meet his eye. Then he's focused on the ceiling again, drawing a knee in to himself.

Seiji's good eye falls to his tea. It's no longer steaming.

"The youkai's not human-like."

He looks up. "Hmm?"

"The inn's youkai. I won't tell you its true form because I'm here to exorcise it. But it's not like a human."

Seiji folds his hands perfectly on his lap, recovering his neat smile. "Thank you for telling me. That only leaves a thousand other possibilities."

Shuuichi raises a shoulder in a shrug.

The emptiness in the room is not solitary anymore, but it has thickened to something even more expectant, to a tautness neither will acknowledge.

He studies the bruises he'd left on Shuuichi's neck. _How is he going to explain those?_ he wonders. Then he smirks.

"You should probably clean your lip."

He locks eyes with Shuuichi. They're red-brown like the drying blood on his lip. "I'm fine. You should get those bruises examined."

It's as close to an apology they will ever get.

"I'll live." Shuuichi stands, walking to the sliding door. But he pauses. He turns, walking to Seiji, who tells himself to keep his composure, to wield that sharp smile like his bow armed with an arrow while ignoring the stinging on his lip.

 _I am implacable. You can_ _not make me feel anythin_ _g_ _anymore_ , Seiji thinks, and then Shuuichi is kneeling in front of him, using the corner of his shirt to wipe the blood from his lip.

"It was bothering me," Shuuichi mumbles, as close as he'd been earlier, but now with tender touch.

Seiji is implacable. Statue-still. He does not lift Shuuichi's chin to see how dark the bruises are. He does not suggest with a dry curl of the lip that they finish what they'd started. He does not remember other secret nights where Shuuichi has desperately and recklessly kissed him. He does not think of how he has allowed himself to be kissed, and how he has kissed back.

Shuuichi puts normal distance between them once more. What must be a trick of the light saddens his expression. He stands, going to the door where he pauses again, and maybe he's coming ba- "You should really wash it, though," he says, and leaves.

Seiji breathes out, a steadying, long measure that would not stir a feather, nor will it stir him.

Implacable.

**Author's Note:**

> [[slurps matoba/natori angst like creamy soup]](https://twitter.com/greenhillyang/status/1131976456626737152)


End file.
